Learning jungle survival techniques in Anthropology class-the Malaysian Batek people

[PayetteRucker]

In my anthropology class, we're doing an in depth study on the Batek people of Malaysia. Pretty fascinating jungle people. We watched a video in class today and learned some interesting stuff about jungle survival. Here are some notable observations I made that I thought were interesting.

The favorite toys of children starting at about 18 months are knives of all sizes, and they love to hack and cut stuff, especially bamboo shafts-including the supports of the bamboo framed palm thatch leanto huts.

Most bush knives are of sheepsfoot design with drastically swept handles, blades of about a quarter inch thick, 2 inches wide and 8 inches to 14 inches long, with rough forged finishes. I also saw thinner (about 1.25 inches wide) Enep style blades with pronounced points and bellies, about 10 inches long. Everything used lashed bamboo scales, and all had forged bottom guards. They use large bush blades for butchering and cleaning monkeys, chopping meat and processing palm leaves and bamboo for making temporary huts for hunting camps, by chocking up on the last 4-5 inches of the blades. Otters and porcupines are run down and hacked to death with bush knives. Dull knives are used for scraping burning hair off of animals, which is a popular way to de-skin them. Cooking fires aren't coal based-they are constantly micromanaged with small sticks, versus burning thicker limbs. The bush knives were also used extensively for splitting vine fibers for making cordage used for making leantos, climbing trees for harvesting fruit, etc.
Knives are maintained with rough files and large industrial whetstones.

They move every week to ten days based on resources-tubor vines, animal nests and fruit trees- and their palm thatch, bamboo frame huts take one person about 4 hours to build. 60% of food is collected tubors, like wild yams and vine roots, but a vast majority of meat is killed with poison darts and blowguns. People take note of monkey and bird nest locations and they are harvested on whim as needed. Darts are carved of wood, rubbed with pith for a complete seal in the blowpipe, and abraisive leaves are used to sand them down to fine points. Poison comes from the sap of local trees, and axes with 25-30 inch wooden hafts are used to cut to the centers of the trees to harvest it. Women do most fishing using nets. Rivers are a popular form of transportation from camp to camp, and big rapids are ran on large lashed bamboo rafts.

Pretty awesome way to live, all in all-the men work about 25 hours a week (including moving time) to build and maintain neccessary hunting tools, and hunt and gather.

Here's a pretty accurate sketch of the more common designs I saw in the video.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

Actually living in the wilderness. Not "fun" and not "survival". It's just their normal existence, a direct outgrowth of the original human Way.

 

[PayetteRucker]

That's the cool part-they are casual about daily tasks and circumstances we'd consider survival-to them it's a very easy simple living.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

I have a great book about the collision between that way of life and modern civilization.
First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World, By Bob Connolly & Robin Anderson.

 

[Shotgun]

That middle knife looks like Fiddleback's machete.

 

[Barbarossa]

Pretty awesome way to live, all in all-the men work about 25 hours a week (including moving time) to build and maintain neccessary hunting tools, and hunt and gather.

Gives them more quality time with the family. Sounds like we are doing things the hard way.

Are these people in trouble of losing their land and way of life due to encroachment of industry? I like watching any show about native people whenever I can and it seems most are losing their land due to loggers all over the world. I watched one the other day, the show was "Going Tribal" with Bruce Parry.

 

[PayetteRucker]

Well what's happening is this tribe's tendancy is shifting more towards slash-and-burn horticulture (chopping down small areas of tall jungle trees and burning them to create farmable land-still small amounts by any respect, but..) versus hunting and gathering, due to the needs of the few traders that come in and out with industrialized goods. The traders want certain things that make it easier for the women and elderly to stay home and garden while the adolescents and the men are in the jungle collecting rattan (a palm vine) and other things that the traders are looking for, versus collecting tubors and fruit and hunting. Farming seems easier to begin with but farming intensive societies spend twice to three times as much time (and calories) making a living as hunting-gathering societies. The shift is almost always caused by the food requirements of industrialized societies and the value of certain industrialized goods (like bush knives, rifles and packs for example) to these primative cultures.

One of the main themes in this book is the family centered culture-men and women spend an equal amount of time with children, and both assume the same familial parenting roles. Children under the age of 5 spend on average 20 hours a day with their parents-they are taken to work alongside the parents. Childhood games are centered around adult practices, like the blowgun, swinging on vines, digging tubors and climbing trees, so by the time the children reach adolescence they are already professional hunters and gatherers.

 

[Barbarossa]

Well what's happening is this tribe's tendancy is shifting more towards slash-and-burn horticulture (chopping down small areas of tall jungle trees and burning them to create farmable land-still small amounts by any respect, but..) versus hunting and gathering, due to the needs of the few traders that come in and out with industrialized goods. The traders want certain things that make it easier for the women and elderly to stay home and garden while the adolescents and the men are in the jungle collecting rattan (a palm vine) and other things that the traders are looking for, versus collecting tubors and fruit and hunting. Farming seems easier to begin with but farming intensive societies spend twice to three times as much time (and calories) making a living as hunting-gathering societies. The shift is almost always caused by the food requirements of industrialized societies and the value of certain industrialized goods (like bush knives, rifles and packs for example) to these primative cultures.

One of the main themes in this book is the family centered culture-men and women spend an equal amount of time with children, and both assume the same familial parenting roles. Children under the age of 5 spend on average 20 hours a day with their parents-they are taken to work alongside the parents. Childhood games are centered around adult practices, like the blowgun, swinging on vines, digging tubors and climbing trees, so by the time the children reach adolescence they are already professional hunters and gatherers.

Thanks for sharing. I think the simple life has many advantages like family life and teaching the kids life's lessons.

 

[Watchful]

I think the simple life has many advantages like family life and teaching the kids life's lessons.

Yeah, but you don't need a primitive lifestyle to do either of these.

I'm reminded of the Guarani tribe which bordered Venezuela and Brazil. In the 1960s, they were almost a stone age culture who lived pretty much as you described the Batek. They did have an assortment of metal blades, but that was the height of their technology.

Anthropologists documented them well, and took great pains to avoid tainting their culture.

Except, by the 1980s, they were all wearing Walkmen,* t-shirts, jeans, and looking for work in the big cities. Not because Western society encroached on them...but that after a brief exposure to Western society, they decided they wanted that better. They actively sought it out.

It's easy to damn modern man for ruining cultures like this, but the reality is usually the other way around. They want beds, air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and ready-cooked food. We don't bring it to them so much as they come and get it.

*For you youngsters, a Sony Walkman was like a really big iPod that only held about an hour of music on something called "tape," which was a magnetic strip that would play pretty well for about two weeks, until you had a song you really wanted a cute girl to hear, in which case, about ten seconds in, the tape would jam and spill out of it, leaving you with something that looked like Spanish moss pouring out of your Walkman. iPods have yet to find a way to get you to buy the same album three or four times like the record industry did with tape. I don't miss it. And that's actually a parable for the story of the Guarani.

 

[Yorkshire Boy]

 

[tenkara]

I contend that the amount of work that a group is capable of performing is directly affected by the amount of energy one has and the amount of energy that one can afford to expend. I believe that there is a survival "law of diminishing returns" in which the Batek find the output of work beyond 25 hours per week to not be worth the extra use of energy. That is a common problem with hard, manual labor. It limits the size of your family, the viable living space you may use, and your chances of surviving in less than optimal conditions for a given biome. In short, I think there is a reason for why some cultures successfully increase and insure the overall survival of their family groups with the aid of new technologies. That's not to say that their isn't any value in learning primitive ways, it's just that primitive methods may not be good for much beyond maintaining a precarious status quo.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

That's not to say that their isn't any value in learning primitive ways, it's just that primitive methods may not be good for much beyond maintaining a precarious status quo.

Precarious perhaps in terms of the individual, but the human race as a whole existed at that level for tens of thousands of years between minute improvements in technology. Some environments, of course, can support this better than others.

 

[Watchful]

I contend that the amount of work that a group is capable of performing is directly affected by the amount of energy one has and the amount of energy that one can afford to expend...That's not to say that their isn't any value in learning primitive ways, it's just that primitive methods may not be good for much beyond maintaining a precarious status quo.

Wow, that's good.

Precarious perhaps in terms of the individual, but the human race as a whole existed at that level for tens of thousands of years between minute improvements in technology. Some environments, of course, can support this better than others.

So's this. Two great points for me to think about.

Damn, I like this BladeForums class. I get so much out of it.

 

[untamed]

Good thread.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

,,, primitive methods may not be good for much beyond maintaining a precarious status quo.

The limiting factor is usually the ability to store food. No sense producing so much it will spoil, especially when there is a good chance of finding more as needed.

 

[bulgron]

Too often people romanticize the primitive way of life. But I always remind myself that the human race largely gave up the primitive way voluntarily. Even though we have to work longer hours in civilization, we also on average live an awful lot longer and an awful lot more comfortably than do primitive cultures.

If I was living in a primitive culture, at 48 I'd be an old man if I was even still alive. So I'll take civilization over primitive living hands down, although I like to visit the primitive way of life every so often, if only to remind myself how good I have it while I "work" by sitting in front of a computer and typing.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

Too often people romanticize the primitive way of life. But I always remind myself that the human race largely gave up the primitive way voluntarily. Even though we have to work longer hours in civilization, we also on average live an awful lot longer and an awful lot more comfortably than do primitive cultures.

I don't agree with this. Technology advanced on the merits only up to a point.

High-energy technology like steam, fossil fuel, gunpowder, all advance as adjuncts to economic or political power. They have nothing to do with a healthier or more comfortable way of life at their origins. In fact, the early industrial revolution was a disaster in terms of health and living conditions. Our modern romantic fixation on "nature" arose in rebellion against its hellish conditions.

 

[richw]

Actually cultures that couldn't create a surplus of food in a static environment remained primitive were usually basically conquered by those cultures that could.

It was actually technology that gave rise to a higher baseline of morality and equality.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

It was actually technology that gave rise to a higher baseline of morality and equality.

Where on the face of this overwhelmingly technologized world do you see equality? Absolute equality evades us all, but low-tech cultures avoid the economic and social extremes seen between individuals in busier societies.

I ignore the concept of morality: without a clear definition, it isn't worth discussing.

 

[Barbarossa]

Too often people romanticize the primitive way of life. But I always remind myself that the human race largely gave up the primitive way voluntarily. Even though we have to work longer hours in civilization, we also on average live an awful lot longer and an awful lot more comfortably than do primitive cultures.

If I was living in a primitive culture, at 48 I'd be an old man if I was even still alive. So I'll take civilization over primitive living hands down, although I like to visit the primitive way of life every so often, if only to remind myself how good I have it while I "work" by sitting in front of a computer and typing.

I agree with this to an extent but I have seen some pretty old people in primitive tribes around the world, especially those whose diet is mainly fish and/or veggies. Neither do I see too many fat primitive people, nor is there a significant rate of the "healthy civilized" diabetes.